


Mercy

by nice_girls_play



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Blood and Injury, First Meetings, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 18:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4971727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nice_girls_play/pseuds/nice_girls_play
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Late entry for Women of Star Trek Week: Chapel Tuesday. Failure to maintain decontamination protocol leads to an unfortunate family reunion and an illuminating first meeting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mercy

The house on Lopez Street had no numerical address -- just an approximate set of coordinates leftover from the times that the home had drifted when hurricanes flooded the city. The transporter technician initially beamed him and Captain Pike down to the west side of Canal Street and they had to run across four lanes of traffic to reach it.

The house was nearly four centuries old, large, painted white with no less than four flags hanging from the upper balustrade (Spock privately counted them: United Federation of Planets, USA, France, the _fleur de lis_ in black and gold). A ginger cat hissed at them as they bounded up the wooden steps onto the porch. The front door (wooden, brass hinges and knob, no sensor or touch pad) opened easily without a key for the wheel lock or a well-placed shoulder to break it down. They entered cautiously, phasers drawn. 

Number One was in the sitting room, unconscious, slouched over in a wooden chair. Her arms, torso, hips and thighs had been secured with what appeared to be painters tape. The lines of the tape overlapped messily and the end of the strip had been raggedly torn -- the roll was on the floor next to the chair.

Captain Pike reached Number One first, pressing the hypo spray into the side of her neck, pushing lank, matted hair back from her face. 

"Can you hear me? Number One? Caroline, can you hear me?"

Spock surveyed the room. Most of the furniture was overturned. The splintered and shattered remnants of what had been a wood and glass coffee table littered the middle of the floor. He spotted a spilled teacup and scattered dry leaves under the glass and wood, a data pad with its screen still lit and set to the cover of a biochemistry text, smelled the coppery tone of blood mixed in with vinegar and antique polish. 

Apart from a gash across the side of her head, Number One wasn't bleeding from what Spock could see. Her face was damp with perspiration consistent with the fever from the virus. Her arms had been secured to the support posts of what appeared to be a kitchen chair, leaving her shoulders squared and pulled back, before the remainder of the tape was used to immobilize her torso. Her ankles were similar in a state, wrapped to the chair legs from knee to ankle. Once she had been rendered immobile, someone had not wanted her to break free.

Through the door he could see the living room opened into a small kitchen area. Unlike many of the private homes he had visited on Earth, the area had not been retrofitted with a replicator. Empty pots and pans were stacked in size-order on top of the ordinary stove, warming plates turned off. The hydro kettle on the adjacent counter was beeping, indicating that the water inside had reached boiling point. He flipped the switch on the side to turn it off. Half a cream cake sat on the nearby table in a translucent cake box, two empty plates arranged at the side with forks and knives neatly arranged. Tea was for the living room, dessert for in here. 

Two plates, two broken cups. 

In the living room, Captain Pike had cut away the majority of the tape and was helping Number One sit up on her own. Her head lolled forward heavily.

"Number One."

"Chris," she murmured, blinking back to consciousness, "Oh god, Chris..."

"Number One, what happened?" Pike repeated, a little louder. 

"Captain!" she shouted, suddenly alert, fear flickering in her gaze. She reached up to grasp his arm. "Captain, where's Chris?"

The sound of a door slamming startled all three of them.

"Mr. Spock." Pike nodded toward the hallway. 

Opposite the kitchen was a smaller foyer that served as a landing for a flight of stairs. To the left was a smaller door, brass hinges and knob, also recently polished. There was a steady hum just beyond the door. Spock reached for the knob, turned it once and pulled. 

The slight figure at the bathroom sink didn't look up when he stepped into the doorway. 

Spock breezed through a quick assessment: female minor child, 15-16 years of age, half an inch shorter than Number One with similar features (complexion, jaw line, eye color), shoulder-length hair that had been chemically lightened less than six weeks before (roots were a robust silver, unlike Number One's dark mane). She was dressed in cotton pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Her feet were bare. She had a dermal regenerator in one hand and appeared to be working on some bruising to her neck and face in the mirror above the sink.

She turned to face him as he fully entered the room, revealing still more injuries: broken capillaries in her left eye, dark contusions high on both cheekbones, swelling on her jaw, lip torn and bleeding.

"Close the door, please."

He stared at her, taking in more details -- pupils constricted, face damp but not with perspiration, no indications of adrenaline response to his presence.

"In or out, whichever," she repeated, the timber of her voice flat and calm, thready on certain syllables. "But close the door."

Her right arm was hanging limply at her side, her shoulder tilted back like an animal compensating for a dead limb. A wound on the back of her head was bleeding sluggishly, staining her hair and the back of her neck.

"Spock."

He caught sight of the captain, the small nod of assent. He carefully closed the door behind him, turning to face the young woman.

"I am Spock, from the U.S.S. Enterprise."

"Yeah, I know," she nodded.

"You require medical attention."

"Working on it. Is that what you're here for?"

Both he and the captain had come prepared with medkits, prepared for any injuries Number One and anyone else might have sustained. He unbuckled the kit that hung by his side and retrieved the medical tricorder.

The scanner beeped rhythmically, spitting out readings in flickers of light. It registered the child's precise age (16 years, five days, 17 minutes), the petechiae around her eyes, bruised larynx, bruised ribs, the open wounds on her face, skull, and hands, her dislocated shoulder. No inter-cranial damage, no internal bleeding, no broken or fractured bones.

"You have no serious internal injuries."

"That's good."

"We will need to relocate your shoulder."

"Hand me that wash cloth." He watched as she twisted it lengthwise and folded it in half. She wedged the folded towel inside her mouth, biting down, clutching the edge of the sink with her free hand. 

_"Goh ahehh."_

He took a slim arm between his two hands -- one at the elbow, one at the shoulder, registered the slight uptick in pulse, cool temperature, the lack of perspiration. Pale eyes met his steadily.

_"Coww uhh fwee."_

He nodded. "One. Two. Three."

The bone slotted back into the joint with a wet popping sound. Spock felt his own joints ache sympathetically, schooled his face to keep from wincing. He watched as the girl tentatively moved her fingers, closing and opening slowly. She lifted her head to pry the washcloth from her mouth. Spock felt a frisson of revulsion as a broken tooth wet with blood and saliva dropped out to sit in the palm of her hand. She stared down at it with shining eyes for a long moment.

"Miss Chapel?"

Her lips pursed, a subtle shift of her chin indicating that she was running her tongue along her lower jaw.

"Wisdom tooth," she finally said, reaching over to drop it into a small rubbish bin next to the toilet. "Arbitrary. Pass me the gauze. Should we do my head next?"

He handed her a packaged gauze pad, faced her in the mirror. "I will need to remove the surrounding hair to do this part," he said. "You will need to wait until the stitching has healed before applying anything regenerative."

"Sure," she nodded, "I've been thinking about a mohawk anyway."

He trimmed away the bits of hair dark with dried blood -- the viscosity betraying the duration of time since the injury and just how brutal their delayed arrival had been. As he brushed the stray locks from her shoulders, several small items scattered, rebounding off the tile floor. He met her gaze in the mirror.

"Glass from the table. I'll sweep it up later."

"Be careful where you step," he warned.

The laser stitching knitted the flesh slowly. For several moments, the sutures were the only sound in the room. 

"What's wrong with her?" she asked, breaking the silence.

"She contracted a virus on our most recent mission."

"Origin and features?"

He thought of the padd scattered under the broken glass. "You take biochemistry."

"Teach. As of next week. LSU. Epidemiology's not my specialty, but I know a few basics."

Intelligent. "Bachelor of Science?"

"Masters. I won't ask you again."

 _Very intelligent._ And, from the tone of her voice, insulted by what she interpreted as evasion. He deemed it unwise to insult her further. 

"Tychus 4. Incubation period of approximately three weeks. Features include reduced norepinephrine and increased dopamine in the brain, fever, prolonged delusions punctuated by severe mood swings and episodes of extreme aggression, followed by psychosis, cerebral edema and death. We escorted a scientific research team back to Starfleet command for debriefing. Pending further investigation, our conclusion is that the virus is resistant to basic decontamination."

Due to the long incubation period, they had initially been unable to pin down how the virus was spread, which was why members of the landing party, including Number One, had been allowed to beam down to Earth before they had realized the full spread of the contamination. By the time Boyce located the cause, it had already been too late. 

"How many members on the team?"

"Four surviving."

"How many members still infected?"

"Three. Our chief medical officer was able to stabilize the spread of the virus and make an antidote from the first team member's blood."

"Patient zero. You'd better give that to me then. I'm not feeling psychotic at the moment, but I can't exactly speak for when the shock wears off."

He pressed the hypospray against the side of her neck, wary of the contusions that had begun to discolor her skin faster than the regenerator could restore the burst capillaries. 

"Thank you," she said, lifting her head once more. 

As he replaced the hypo, Spock glanced at the items lined up on the counter next to his medkit -- distilled vinegar, baking soda, hydrogen peroxide. He abruptly realized the smell he'd been unable to place for the past twenty minutes was a musty mix of sweat and laundry detergent emanating from the young woman's clothes. There had been glass fragments in her hair but not on her clothing. The sink basin was damp with water and there was chalky white sediment around the drain. A quick scan of the rest of the room revealed a spare outline on the floor where a clothing hamper had most likely been. He wondered where it was now.

"You're holding a laser suture next to my head. I don't want to be picky but please refrain from daydreaming."

"You were attempting to remove evidence," he said. She _was_ removing evidence. Even as he stitched the laceration to her scalp, she had the regenerator in her hand and was back to healing the bruising around her eyes and nose, unmoved by this revelation.

"Chemistry students tend to become flustered when their T.A. shows up with bruises."

She had been actively attempting to remove evidence prior to their arrival. The clothes she was wearing had retained her body heat but lacked the scent of blood, and furniture varnish that would have been consistent with the scene in the living room. 

She met his stare in the mirror, a flicker of defiance signalling that she was aware of the details he had assessed; that she had hoped another officer might not have been so observant. A pause elapsed as they appraised each other's reflections. She broke the gaze first, regrouping quickly.

"It got a bit loud in here. And we've got nosy neighbors."

"You were concerned about the authorities."

"If someone wanted to, they could make the case for assault which is a felony, whether I elect to press charges or not. Grounds for inquiry from Starfleet even without a conviction. Even with the extenuating circumstances of the virus accounted for, that leaves her open to a review. You've indicated there were inadequate quarantine measures that allowed an infected party to leave the ship -- that involves Captain Pike, possibly Dr. Boyce, possibly you. She's got a martyr complex. Put her and any one of you in front of a review committee and she'll fall on her sword. No one wants that."

"She would most likely return to Earth." And to New Orleans, he privately added.

" _No one_ wants that."

The auto-suture hummed as the final stitch closed the wound. 

"You're all off the hook," she turned her head, reached back to brush more hair and glass from her shoulders. "If anyone asks me, the extent my distress was purely... emotional. You took my statement and showed compassion to a frightened young girl."

"Who teaches biochemistry."

"Who appreciates your compassionate action," she supplanted. "Also, Chem 100. My program is biochemistry, my students are business majors that need a science credit."

He followed the stitches to her scalp with her lip, watched as the swelling on her face receded, revealing pale eyes and skin, the fullness of adolescence laid over steely resolve. 

"How do you feel?" he asked once they had finished.

"Nearly human," she paused, brow furrowed in concentration. "Still in shock, I think."

"Dr. Boyce will need to examine you to make sure you are fit to remain in the domicile."

"Right now?" She sat down on the closed toilet lid and began lacing up a pair of tennis shoes. 

"You had direct contact with an infected party. You have been administered the antidote but not in the presence of the chief medical officer. There are certain protocol to be followed if we are to avoid a review."

"Of course," she nodded. "Would you hand me my jacket? It's on the hook just behind you."

He reached for the jacket (cotton, dove grey with a university crest embroidered above the left breast), handed it to her. "Has there been contact with anyone else?"

She shook her head.

"Grandmère's been in Baton Rouge for the past two days. Apart from some stray cats in the yard, I'm the only one here."

He watched as she slid her right arm into the jacket, still flexing her fingers

"Regarding your statement..." he said, leaving the question open-ended.

"Ah, yes," she said, her tone flattening. "She came to see me for my birthday. She'd been feeling ill since at least this morning. I thought it might be heat exhaustion. She hasn't been back in a while -- that happens. I was going to make lunch, thought we might have tea and cake first. I went to ask her which kind she wanted. She came after me. I put her down."

Factual, consistent with the scene they'd found in the living room, removed of any detail that would cause embarrassment for Starfleet or Number One.

"Did she say anything to you? Before or during the attack?"

"Such as?"

"Why."

Incidents arising from infected parties appeared to stem from personal conflicts. Two members of the team from Tychus 4 had been involved in an extramarital affair. The distress between the two parties and a tenuously involved third member of the team had featured heavily in their descriptions of individual psychotic episodes. Strong emotional connections with unresolved conflict could be root for any number of types of personal distress. 

Spock knew there was a considerable age gap between them -- nearly two decades, from what he'd seen in the personnel files. Boyce had once mentioned the younger woman's name in relation to Number One's psychological profile, but the nature of his comment was nebulous and he had become close-lipped when the captain pressed him further. 

She stared at him now, a glimmer of something sharp and contemptuous breaking through the mask, and, just underneath, agony. 

"Caroline has a reason for everything that she does. I don't need to know why," she paused, recovering quickly. "I'm not even curious, to be honest."

Spock nodded. "Would you like to see her before you go to the ship? She is conscious and has been administered the antidote."

"Not really," she answered, zipping her jacket. "The backyard's just through the kitchen. We can beam out from there, right?" 

He nodded, following her outside, unconsciously mimicking the lightness of her steps as the murmured voices from the living room grew louder. He closed the door silently behind them.

The backyard had a communal area that echoed the atmosphere of the kitchen, complete with picnic tables, bright clusters of wildflowers, and slate paving stones. A decorative fountain bubbled nearby, dark water punctuated by the rust color of dead leaves and the reflective scales of several goldfish. A Russian blue cat was curled up at the bottom of the stairs. The girl reached down to stroke its head as they descended to the slate porch. 

"Ready when you are," she said, turning to face him.

He nodded, flipping open his communicator. "Spock to Enterprise."

"Enterprise here, Mr. Spock."

"Lieutenant Tyler, one civilian to beam up on my coordinates. Patient has been administered the antidote but have Dr. Boyce waiting on stand-by."

"Roger that, sir. Boyce already here and waiting."

She met his gaze, eyes glassy, overlaid with stillness that was different from the flat affect he had witnessed for the past hour. He wondered if the shock was wearing off, recalled a feature-length animation his mother had shown him once: a living doll, poised, sewing herself back together.

"It was good to meet you, Miss Chapel," he said.

"It was good to meet you finally, Mr. Spock," she said, the shimmer of the transporter beam already taking her. "Tell Caroline she owes me a coffee table."

**Author's Note:**

> Memory Alpha lists Christine Chapel's birth place as New Orleans, Louisiana. Her family home is based on India House, a historic home and backpacking hostel in the Mid-City area. Louisiana State University is maybe a ten-minute ride away on the trolley. Since Majel Barrett played both characters, there are a number of fan works that depict Chapel and Number One as sisters. I thought it would be interesting to take that idea in a slightly different direction.


End file.
